Day 87 - Metakgp Wiki goes down and comes back up; Script to snapshot each week

Next up: Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. I was going to read Dennis Lehane’s
Mystic River (because Donna Tartt said that that was the book that pushed her to
write Secret History), but it was about 350 or 450 pages or something, and I
wanted to stick to smaller books which I can be reasonably sure I would complete
than involve myself in a huge book which I would be rather skeptical about
completing.

The setting for Daughter of Time is peculiar, apparently, it’s an analysis /
investigation of a painting and a murder by an investigator on his hospital bed
for 2 days (or more? The whole book, basically). I am a little nervous about
whether I would like this book or not, the lethargy that is conveyed in the plot
synopsis is part of the reason why. I am taking the plunge, nonetheless. (That
book also featured in a major daily’s Top 100 Crime Novels list)

Metakgp’s Wiki went down some time around 2017-05-15
0930 +5.5. It was down for about 40 hours before being bought back up with a
recovery read-only server and appropriate changes to the DNS records.

It was because of a kernel panic, it seems for now. We are tracking the incident
on a issue at Github: metakgp/metakgp
#17. One thing I was surprised
with was the speed with which the update in the DNS records started showing up
on my browser. (It was immediate) I wonder if that was because Cloudfare was
doing some kind of magic with DNS propagation or because the browser got the
correct DNS instead of the cached ones because of the earlier 500 responses from
the cached one.

This also led to metakgp/metakgp #18: Snapshot the wiki droplet every
week. The Digital Ocean API is
rather powerful, and I have heard a lot about how people use it to add and
remove droplets from their fleet depending on the load to their application.
This particular functionality should be possible with a POST request and a DELETE
requese. I am guessing that from the REST API assurance that DO seems to imply,
I think it should be easy enough to write the script.

I have started writing it in Ruby and some part of it is done, I should be able
to finish it off and deploy it this week. I have found that small tasks like
these have an exponentially decreasing graph where the y axis is Enthusiasm to
finish the task and the x axis is Time after ideation. Right now, the the
x-axis is at 14 hours and my enthusiasm is above the threshold. We will see what
becomes of that tomorrow morning.